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It's reached a new nadir of WTF -today - in his last message (seen below) he advances this idea that humans immediately following the act of creation are for want of a better word 'perfect' - and there then proceeds over the succeeding generations 'a gradual degradation of the pattern' if you will such then humans alive today are at the furthest point from God's original model - and this is somehow bound up with our increasing knowledge of science (AKA Satan's great deception) in that we are all somehow at our most corrupted and removed from the divine, which is why it's so fucking impossible to identify.

What hope of a reasonable dialogue with something so twisted, conspiratorial and make-believe as that?

As for the conversation, it's pretty much as I expected: a bunch of flowery language and talk about possibilities versus dealing in FACTS and in the MECHANISMS which give rise to those facts. The believers for what I've seen don't much want to deal in either, because they upset the applecart.

"The whole world would have heard the message?!?" China never did, nor did Japan. Neither record a flood of stupendous volume, completely covering either country or describe in their histories people who lived multiple centuries. "People forgot HOW to live for centuries???" That one doesn't even deserve the dignity of a reply! Do we have to get into the question of how Noah got the kangaroos from Australia and lemurs from Madagascar?

As for the earth being 6,000 years old or so, there are fossilized trees with rings far older, never mind samarium, potassium and rubidium samples which give consistent radiometric evidence of our planet's age on a scale of billions of years rather than thousands. I suppose Yahweh did it all this way to fool his creation into thinking that maybe Earth was 4.5 billion years old, "to challenge our faith." If that's the case, then this deity is not only a bloodthirsty, megalomaniacal egotist, but a trickster and deceiver of the first water. WHY would anyone worship such a bastard? Oh, because we are a bunch of dumb humans who can't see his whole purpose. Besides, we were TOLD TO!

All of this reinforces something I've said for a long time: that it is far easier to believe something simplistic than it is to KNOW and UNDERSTAND something far more complex. Yet it is that knowing in detail which gives rise to the quality of life and the increasing longevity we currently enjoy in the 21st century. Those benefits are the result of scientific pursuits which mankind has only been engaged in systematically for roughly the last 4-500 years, where religion and superstition have held the day for orders of magnitude longer. It should be no surprise that those misguided myths continue to dominate human perception; human social inertia has maintained them and it will take energy and effort to turn that inertia to a more intelligent direction.

The sad part is that we will very likely be fighting that tendency toward laziness and ignorance all the way. Whether those traits are hard-wired in us or not, I don't know. This is my admittedly subjective analysis of how things stand at the moment.

Then we switch to my page... after some pleasantries we get stuck in...

And that is where we find things as I wake up today: only by setting aside ALL of what we verifiably know about reality and how it works does the "painting > painter; creation> creator" argument make any sense, which is what I'm about to go and say to him, but this will in his view just mean I'm a functionary of Satan .. or something.